Self-hosting is having a moment, but as interesting as it sounds, figuring out what you want to self-host is just as important as the process of setting it up. You can spin up containers all day long, but unless they’re solving a problem in your life, it’s just tinkering for tinkering’s sake.

It’s the problem I faced when I started dabbling with building a home server years ago. Community forums, Reddit, and even YouTube channels were full of interesting projects that looked cool. I wasn’t sure where to begin. Did I want my own cloud? A media server? A smart home hub? The more I read, the more options I saw, and the less clear the starting point became. Did I even need half of these apps and services?

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